profile

Design Current

🔥 What we learned: Crafting AI products that stick

Published 11 months ago • 1 min read

From Hype to Habit: Crafting AI Products that Stick

Thanks for joining our event!

We had a great time last night - with an inspiring discussion, 2 lucky raffle winners, and plenty of great conversations.

Missed the event?

See event recording here: 🎥 Link
Get our UX guide for trustworthy AI products: 👉 Link​
​

Here’s a quick recap of the highlights.

Key Takeaways

1. Make sure you are solving real, specific problems

  • Don’t lead with the tech - start with the user’s pain point
  • Successful AI products target recurring, concrete needs

2. AI Shines in “fuzzy” problem spaces

  • It's best suited for tasks that don’t require 100% precision ​
  • Great for summarization, suggestions, categorization, prototyping
  • Not ideal for high-stakes, exact-output tasks

3. It's still important to keep humans in the loop

  • Use AI for the repetitive, not the irreplaceable
  • Humans shine in nuance, creativity, and taste
  • Example: curating new trends, strategic decision-making

4. Ask yourself, how should this AI product make users feel?

  • Expect users to be skeptical to AI, so it's important to build trust
  • Prioritize: guidance, education, control, feedback, and personalization

5. Time savings ≠ compelling value (alone)

  • Many AI products emphasize their time-saving benefits
  • But they underdeliver. Users rarely care about saving 5 minutes
  • It's important to tie time savings to money, output, or impact

How to design for trust in AI

We created a guide with 10 essential UX patterns to design for trust in your AI product.

Books and podcast recs

We asked attendees to give us book and podcast recommendations. Here are the top mentions:

  • 🎙️ Acquired
  • 🎙️ Lenny’s Podcast
  • 🎙️ Work Life
  • 🎙️ Hidden Brain
  • 📖 Give and Take

NYC recs

We also asked attendees to tell us cool NYC spots they recommend:

  • 🪩 Nowadays
  • 🍺 Von Bar
  • 🍲 Wayan
  • 🎵 Public Records
  • 📚 Rooftop at NYPL

The event was brought to you by Koi Studios, Brooklyn Product Design, and BrainStation.

Hope to see you again in the future!

Anyi & Andrea

Cofounders @ Koi Studios​

P.S., we run a newsletter at Koi Studios with UX gems and best practices. You can subscribe here.

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

Design Current

by Koi Studios

Subscribe to get UX strategies, design trends, and real-world examples to help you build better products.

Read more from Design Current
A pink 3D illustration of a browser window with an empty white screen and a small chat bubble, representing AI chat interface UX design.

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design, brought to you by Koi Studios. Studio Update Applying UX to democracy?! I (Anyi) led a journey mapping session at Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Alongside political scientists, campaign staff, election administrators, technologists, and philanthropists, we mapped the end-to-end journey of American voters. Read more about it here. More to come, stay tuned. 4 AI chat UX patterns...

6 days ago • 3 min read

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. In this issue, you will see designs and reflections that inspired us in the past month. Studio Update Designing for civic tech Andrea, our co-founder and design director at Koi, spoke at Folsom Tech Week about UX in GovTech and CivicTech. It's something we care deeply about. We wake up every day feeling the weight of what's happening in the world and wanting to do more with the skills we have. Over the past...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. In this issue, we want to share a few design inspirations and thought pieces that has helped us grow and reflect. First, a celebration! Our studio has just entered our 4th year! We started Koi Studios with a simple belief: thoughtful design can do good. What began as a desire to create impactful work grew into a studio built around care: for users, partners, and the problems worth solving. Fast forward to...

2 months ago • 2 min read